Slides by DesignModo – An In-Depth Review

DesignModo has received much praise in the past bringing great, intuitive, and well-designed tools to the market and so we decided to put together a review of their product, the Slides Framework.

Now, before we start off, it is important to understand that this product is not for everyone and this review is by no means a comparison of capabilities against WordPress. With that said, everyone’s requirements are different and if you are looking for a convenient and super time effective way to create a simple one-page website then you should definitely turn your head towards Slides’ direction.

Whenever Designmodo brings out something new, I get quite excited. Why, you may ask? Because I personally think Designmodo makes some of the prettiest — and often most innovative — webpage-building elements around. So when I heard for the first time about their release, Slides, I was as keen as ever to learn more, find out how it worked and, perhaps most importantly, see whether or not it lives up to expectations.

What are Slides?

As mentioned above, Slides is a framework by DesignModo. It is based on its own CSS3, JavaScript, and HTML5 language with a unique code and structure that lets you create, with minimum effort, visually captivating single-page websites with a lot of built-in options. It basically consists of 64 slides that you can use in whichever combination you’d like in order to create your own unique website. This website would, of course, display its content in a transition slider manner i.e. only one slide is displayed at a time and the slides keep changing as the reader scrolls.

This becomes a fluid manner for presenting content and looks great while working the part too. It is easy enough to be used by just about anyone with a little bit of web development knowledge (HTML, FTP server).

Take a look at the Official Slides Demo and you should see what I mean.

Slides Features

Time Saving

Time is on your side if you are working with Slides.

You start out by logging into their online interface which is called Generator. From there on you simply go along selecting from the wide range of slides and put them in the order you want them in. You will then set up the animations you’d like for the transition effect between slides and preview what the finished product will look like. If you are happy with what you see then you can download a .zip file containing what is essentially your website ready to be uploaded to your hosting server.

This whole process can be completed in minutes and it is fairly simple and easy. Keep in mind that you will need to edit and replace the demo data and images with the one’s that you plan to publish. Although this is a simple task for someone with basic programming knowledge it can be tricky for someone who’s not the least bit programming literate.

2. Comes with Templates

Slides come with a library of 64 slides that you can mix and match according to your preference and it can result in some pretty amazing end products.

But if you find yourself at a loss then DesignModo has 15 well-balanced templates with a great design that you can pick to start your website with – there are options for everyone here! Beautiful slides, retina ready display, and tons of options to choose from for background images or a white background if that is more suited towards your needs.

These slide templates can be arranged in whichever way you’d like so they can be presented as a variety of things – event sales, personal promotions or campaigns, product launches – making your workflow much easier all the while giving you a ton of flexibility. You also have the ability to directly add images from sites such as Unsplash and Pexels for obtaining more free images for your projects.

3. Amazing Animation Effects

Slides also ship with custom animations that you can add to your slides. While these might not be the flashiest of animations out there, they are well-suited and bring subtle brilliance to the overall presentation of your website.

There are a number of different animation styles to choose from, such as Stack, Zen, Zoom, and Film among others, and effects setting panel that lets you set up the speed and smoothness of your slide transition animations, as well as the option between animated and static elements. You can also change the direction of your slide transition i.e. have your site scroll vertically or horizontally, from this panel.

While these may not seem like a lot of options, not many are needed when you are working with what Slides is providing you with. Which happens to be a good thing as all of them look decent and there is no need to spend a great deal of time experimenting with what fits best.

4. Huge Components Library

Slides ship with a huge components library that features unique and stylish elements to help you add more visual appeal to your custom slides. Webmasters can make creative combinations of various components to create a masterpiece without having to code a single line. The wide-range of carefully crafted components empowers users to elegantly present their business to visitors.

According to user reviews, Slides offers an all-out designing platform that enables users to create all kinds of landing pages. By leveraging the different components, users can quickly piece together a unique, custom landing page within minutes.

Some of the most commonly used components in this space include buttons, videos, images, pricing tables, testimonials, e-commerce elements, background images, and much more. In addition to this, all of the components are fully customizable which allows users to modify them to fit their site’s brand. Landing pages are vital to the success of any business and Slides’ huge library of components makes it infinitely easier to create them without having to invest a significant amount of time.

Drawbacks

Slides is a very focused product: it can only be used to produce single-page websites with slide-like (sliding, fading or a few other types of animations) transitions — if you’re after anything else, this simply isn’t for you!

Priced at $249, Slides isn’t cheap. According to the official website, however, the price is for ‘unlimited sites’ (for more on this — and other things, such as browser support — see the official Slides FAQ), meaning this isn’t a price you’ll pay for every site you create with it! That said, if you’re only going to use it to create a single site, it’s arguably a little on the steep side.

And, of course, Slides can, by its very nature — being simply constructed of HTML, a dollop of CSS, a sprinkling of JavaScript and a few media files — only be used to create single web pages. This means it is quite limiting (although not necessarily in a bad way) when used on its own.

Wrapping It Up

So what can we gather from all of this? For the webmasters who do require all of the features that Slides provides, it is very hard to go wrong with Slides because it gives you everything you need to build unique, professional-looking websites. It is a complete system. Different businesses and other professionals can undoubtedly utilize this great tool for many projects and derive great value from it. It has a lot of potential for productivity and that combined with ease of use makes it a great convenience for its users.

It would be safe to conclude that, while a great product that is nicely rounded and well-designed, Slides just isn’t for everyone. It is not a tool for building a large, multi-page website, giant inventory system, an e-store, or even a decent sized blog. But then it would be very unreasonable to expect it to do so much as it is not designed to do these tasks. What it is designed to do it does very, very well so this point is a distinction rather than a criticism.